Ethereum uses Ethash as its proof-of-work which is very memory bandwidth bound. AMD’s Radeon RX Vega uses HBM2 memory which provides significant bandwidth over GDDR5 because of their design. Taking the fact that a single Ethash requires 8KB of memory bandwidth, a single MH requires around 7.8GB of memory bandwidth. This is calculated by multiplying 1,000,000 by 8KB and dividing it by 1048576. Applying this to Vega 56, it converts to 409.6GB/s divided by 7.8GB giving a hash rate of 52.5 MH/s. For the RX Vega 64, it is 483.8GB/s divided by 7.8GB which results in approximately 63.4 MH/s.

Should I Start Panicking?

This is a lot lower than the 70 to 100 MH/s rumour which was floated earlier. However, this is still within the desirable range for some miners. This is because it is a linear increase from the RX 570 and RX 580. Power consumption itself is not a big issue since the hash performance is memory bound. This means the GPU can be downvolted and downclocked. Plus, the return makes it worth the while for many professional miners.

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Comments

The only viable solution to GPU shortages is for AMD to create specialized GPU cards primarily focused on the mining front – a small team of enthusiasts in their R & D pool to figure out long-term changes in the mining trends to anticipate any changes – hammer that into the most feasible hardware configuration, and release it. Sadly, Etherium loves memory bandwidth, so that’ll push memory shortages for the HBMs as well. Mining Feasibility studies, opening up mining forums to collect data from the miners who want to contribute, working with the mining software communities to further improve compatibility & performance.

Or they could just gimp its mining prowess and let it be – but seriously, people will always find ways to digitize currency through this mining thing. It might just be an inevitable part of the GPU & memory market share.

Miners want to be able to sell their cards back on the used market to gamers after they upgrade. Can’t do that with specialized cards. They’ll still buy the GPUs for traditional graphics, even if you make dedicated cards.

The problem is mining cards get beaten up as they’re 100% utilized most of the time. The last thing you need is the unpredictability of your recently bought 2nd-hand mining card for gaming only to die on you. Hence the flooding of the market of used mining cards adding an already bad rep for miners.

Not only that, I hear there are big russian companies housing custom mining rigs inside warehouses for stockpiling digital currency. It’s not just the regular joe that’s doing it.

The viable solution is simply, if gamers use 100k cards and miners uses 2.100.000 cards the make the fucking 2.800.000 gpus Gamers would be happy Miners would be happy Amd investors and board members would be happy, delighted, and celebrating profits

You can’t manufacture when there’s nothing to manufacture, if there is a shortage in the materials needed to make the memory components. Flash-based memory parts have been scarce and will continue to do so in the next months reaching next year.

ETH is bound by memory LATENCY, not just by memory BANDWIDTH – or else the GTX 1080 would mine ETH at a HIGHER hashrate than the GTX 1070 does (in actual fact the GTX 1080 is 15% or so SLOWER on ETH mining despite having MORE cores and 20% more memory BANDWIDTH). HBM has high latency compared to GDDR5 – which is why the Fury line with it’s huge bandwidth was fairly POOR on ETH mining performance. HBM2 should be somewhat better – but not enough to support the claims about 70Mh/s+ ETH mining performance. 50 perhaps WITH some driver upgrades, long shot 60 but I’d have to SEE 60 to believe it.

For mining on non-ETH algo coins, memory latency and memory bandwidth are generally NOT major issues, and Vega is likely to do quite well – much like the 1080ti is the king (right now) of ZEC as it can put all those high-clocked cores to effective use.